Western Digital RE 4TB Enterprise Hard Drive Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture. We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and thus we no longer included it. The most important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.

While the RE 4TB posts some decent numbers, they don't come close to what higher end mass-market HDDs can put forth. The fact of the matter is that the lower density platters do hurt its performance when compared to the 1TB per platter Seagate Barracuda. Of course, this new Raid Edition drive does have 25% more capacity so this minor reduction in performance could be more than offset by its long term performance and resilience. After all, as a drive is filled closer to capacity its performance noticeably decreases and where any 3TB – let alone 2TB or 1TB – typically starts to fade this drive will still be cruising along at a breakneck pace. It is not until past the 3TB point that it dips below the 100MB/s mark and that is indeed impressive.